May 29, 2014

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In academia, where brand reputation is everything, one university holds an especially enviable place these days when it comes to attracting students and money. To find it from this center of learning, turn west and go about 2,700 miles.

Riding a wave of interest in technology, Stanford University has become America’s “it” school, by measures that Harvard once dominated. Stanford has had the nation’s lowest undergraduate acceptance rate for two years in a row; in five of the last six years, it has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their “dream college”; and year in and year out, it raises more money from donors than any other university.

No one calls Duke “the Stanford of the South,” or the University of Michigan “the public Stanford,” at least not yet. But, for now at least, there is reason to doubt the long-held wisdom that the consensus gold standard in American higher education is Harvard, founded 378 years ago, which held its commencement on Thursday.

“There’s no question that right now, Stanford is seen as the place to be,” said Robert Franek, who oversees the Princeton Review’s college and university guidebooks and student surveys. Of course, that is more a measure of popularity than of quality, he said, and whether it will last is anyone’s guess.

A few comments:

- Climate, scenic beauty, spaciousness, and even perhaps architecture (Harvard's campus is surprisingly unprepossessing, at least relative to Yale, Duke, or the U. of Chicago) give Stanford's campus a big edge over Harvard's.

- Fashions change immensely slowly among colleges. I visited Stanford in the mid-70s and concluded: Why go anywhere else? But that logic apparently took about another four decades to sink in nationally.

- The history of Stanford is entwined with the history of Silicon Valley and both are entwined with the history of those "pseudosciences:" IQ testing and eugenics.

- One obvious way to Fight Inequality is for America's most fashionable name brand schools to enlarge their freshman class sizes significantly. Yet, almost none of them have bothered, preferring instead to become more elite as ever more applicants fight over a stable number of openings. Stanford would be particularly well set to expand significantly because, besides its vast endowment, it has a staggeringly large campus of over 12 square miles that provides more than an acre per undergrad.

48 comments:

Harvard does take one part of "equality" seriously. I think its at the point where 80% of its class graduates with "honors." You're only equal once you are in the club. =)On another note, those same folks without direction on the East Coast who flooded the investment banks are now leaving in droves to jump into start-ups, setting up inevitably a large Wall Street diaspora to Silicon Valley with another batch to Boston of course. Curious to see what will happen out West though.The people you meet in these overpriced schools... (no regrets about pissing away 200K on a very expensive social symbol, only getting "more exclusive")

heh. they still underpay in some fields. 2 years ago, stanford offered my brother only 80 grand a year to be the assistant coach for one of their sports teams, and he had to turn it down because it simply wasn't enough.

if they had come it at 100 he would have taken the job immediately. for 60 to 70 hour work weeks, and the price of housing out there, 80 grand a year was a non-starter. he now makes 100 a year in a much cheaper state and recently bought his first house.

harvard's reputation as the clear cut number 1 has been eroding for years now, among people who study this stuff anyway. it's not like harvard has fallen over and crashed, but it definitely is not far and away the single dominant force in most academic fields anymore. it's still one of the best but not the obvious leader at this point. has the princeton math department exceeded what harvard offers at math 55?

Stanford is aptly placed as it is part of the whole Silicon Valley industry. It's positioned as the most "relevant" 2010's or current era of things that matter most, on the cusp of new breakthroughs, etc.

Stanford offers something for everyone. The tech field; an excellent medical school; engineering among the tops in the nation; and also 2nd overall in most NCAA championships.

And yet, you could completely shut down the university's athletic programs and unlike most state schools, Stanford's academic excellence is more than enough to continue raising the endowment. It truly holds its own with the Ivies in more ways than one.

Around 1965 my dad was sent by his employer to one of those Stanford summer management school things..he was knocked out, and sent back photos with suggestions of mm, uh hey, it's really neat here, ever think about applying?

But my grades were already sliding in HS and knew there was no way. Besides, I was craving an Eastern Experience. God bless a kid who recognizes a good thing in his backyard and figures out how to get there.

>>jody said..."""""heh. they still underpay in some fields. 2 years ago, stanford offered my brother only 80 grand a year to be the assistant coach for one of their sports teams, and he had to turn it down because it simply wasn't enough."""""""""""

Maybe it's old school, jody, but I think that 80grand for an assistant is way overpaid.

Come on. Not like he teaches an an actual discipline like Engineering or STEM related fields.

That's just an assistant! Come on. No way an assistant coach has any right whatsoever to out earn a legitimate professor of Engineering, Physics, etc. If this were the ideal world, which of course it is not.

And, Stanford doesn't care. Sports is not what it mainly has to offer for this current era of graduates. And they STILL are 2nd all time in the NCAA championship list!

MIT could be the best school in Boston if they had a medical school. Nothing literally works better than a vicious academic medical center where everyone is welcome to get 20K a year to "teach" if all research grants are lost. Those things matter to the "reputation seekers." Why do you think Steve Sailer's own Rice is always in perpetual talks to buy Baylor Medical School (aside from Baylor's funding issues)

Holly came from Miami F.L.A.Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.Plucked her eyebrows on the way,shaved her legs and then he was a she.She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.

"One obvious way to Fight Inequality is for America's most fashionable name brand schools to enlarge their freshman class sizes significantly. "

Maybe there is a maximum size for such an enterprise. So what needs to be done is to create new ones.

But isn't the choke point the faculty? Is there enough to quality faculty worldwide willing to relocate to the US to create another Ivy league quality institution? WWI, WWII, the cold war, and the dirty wars in S America chased a lot of talent to the US. I think smarties must sort of like working in Switzerland for example.

Even in the US, do not expect the U. of Indiana to close to accomodate Stanfords need for faculty. Indiana has senators too, and they will make sure Indiana gets it's cut.

I loved Harvard's ancient campus, built simply by Puritans to last, and maintained very expensively, and expanded in the same restrained Puritan style.

It is probably the single best preserved collection of colonial architecture that continues to be used as intended. There is no other place like it in the USA, just little slices of history like Washington Mews surrounded by ugly new buildings.

I got an Eng Lit B.A. degree from Princeton in the mid-'70s, and then -- because I had nothing better to do and because it was the '70s -- I went and got an Eng Lit M.A. from Stanford. The profs, the academics and the classes at Stanford were MUCH better than they were at Princeton.

It's interesting that UC Berkeley doesn't loom larger in the imagination. It has lower SAT scores and more students, and they work students harder, but it's just across the bay from Stanford, and has a good STEM tradition. They should be punching in a higher weight class in Silicon Valley, and should have more companies based near them.

You cant have a truly elite university where it never, ever snows. Cold and snow are needed to toughen kids up. I grew up thinking of Stanford as similar to Duke and Northwestern, and I still believe that. Nice place, but not HYP.

My guess is that Princeton has the best quality of life, including somewhat better girls and weather than HY.

People rave about the weather and climate at Stanford. That's fine if you are going to college to study mountain biking but the crappier weather in Cambridge or New Haven are actually advantages if you have a true academic bent. I went undergrad to an East Coast Ivy and to Stanford for grad school. At least in the 1990s Stanford did not match up at all in the serious humanistic disciplines. Still, if your intention is just to use college as a spring-board for a career in tech, finance or law Stanford probably is the best place to go.

People rave about the weather and climate at Stanford. That's fine if you are going to college to study mountain biking but the crappier weather in Cambridge or New Haven are actually advantages if you have a true academic bent. I went undergrad to an East Coast Ivy and to Stanford for grad school. At least in the 1990s Stanford did not match up at all in the serious humanistic disciplines. Still, if your intention is just to use college as a spring-board for a career in tech, finance or law Stanford probably is the best place to go.

People rave about the weather and climate at Stanford. That's fine if you are going to college to study mountain biking but the crappier weather in Cambridge or New Haven are actually advantages if you have a true academic bent.

to get equal coaches in sports where they are not paying million dollar salaries, they have to pay more than other universities, because the cost of living is way higher out there. period. they can't pay you 50 grand to be the assistant track & field or wrestling or soccer coach. a 35 year old adult will refuse to live out there on that kind of salary. they will take another job in another state for more money where it's also less expensive to live.

i work out with a guy who was the assitant strength trainer at pittsburgh for 1 year. he quit because he could make more money in a corporate job while training as a powerlifter in his spare time, rather than training pittsburgh's NCAA players full time, who he found to be annoying and unserious. however, if the players weren't such disappointments to work with, he would have stayed, because even though the money wasn't great, pittsburgh doesn't cost much to live in.

he told me all the players think they are going pro, when only 2 or 3 pittsburgh players go pro in any sport per year.

in 2009 penn state had to pay cael sanderson 250 grand a year to leave iowa state and coach their wrestling team, because they wanted to win at wrestling. they got results. now they pay him over 300 a year with incentives to keep him winning championships for them. this is the salary range for all these sports. swimming & diving, tennis, wrestling, track & field, golf. coaches are all paid between 100 and 300, some up to 500. if you want to win, you bring in the best guys. if you're building a major NCAA program in one of these sports, total salaries for all coaches goes up quick. course, 500 for a football coach would be a bargain. shouldn't expect results from him unless he's a younger prodigy type.

The number of tech startups in NYC has exploded in recent years, but local VC Fred Wilson has argued that NYC needs a "big exit" (IPO or acquisition) to get to the next level. A multibillion dollar exit would create a lot of multimillionaire angel investors who could get the perpetual motion machine spinning.

Foursquare looked like it could be that big exit a few years ago but it seems to have lost steam.

I am from the Peninsula/South Bay Area, grew up on the Stanford campus and later Palo Alto. I've attended Stanford football games at USC and tailgated on the USC campus. What struck me the most were the large contingent of Mexican/latino USC fans who I assume never attended USC but considered USC their team or LA's team.

Whereas at Stanford, you'd be hard-pressed to find a latino Stanford fan that didn't attend the school or any college - like many Mexican USC fans. Is that because Stanford is much more elitist than USC and doesn't exactly want to "reach out" to the communities of San Jose and other nearby locales that have a sizeable latino population...and that latinos cannot relate to Stanford - but they can to San Jose State University and, to a lesser extent, UC-Berkeley?

""""""""""""""""that was the point. they didn't care enough to up the offer."""""""""""""""

Last time I checked, the jobs in the NCAA are university jobs and the NCAA is not the NFL.

In the ideal world a sports assistant coach has no business whatsoever out earning a legitimate professor of Physics, Medicine, Engineering, even Law. Colleges are supposed to be about academics not bread and circuses.

""""""""""to get equal coaches in sports where they are not paying million dollar salaries, they have to pay more than other universities, because the cost of living is way higher out there. period. they can't pay you 50 grand to be the assistant track & field or wrestling or soccer coach. a 35 year old adult will refuse to live out there on that kind of salary. they will take another job in another state for more money where it's also less expensive to live."""""""""""

Right, so that 50grand for an assistant goes a lot farther and that's probably what Pitt offered for the job. No way that they'd offer more for an assistant job.

You know, in some high schools across US they pay assistant coaches 50grand or more? What is this coming to?

""""""""because even though the money wasn't great, pittsburgh doesn't cost much to live in."""""""""

It's one of the lowest in US and they're not gonna pay fifty grand if they can help it. They're parsimonious for a reason.

My impression about New York is that the geeks hate the place because the bankers steal all the women (remember, these guys aren't too smooth to begin with), and there's no big engineering school to draw from.

But I could be wrong--the city's gotten a lot of money in the last few decades, and maybe they can buy themselves a tech industry.

I grew up in Palo Alto, and knew the Stanford campus like the back of my hand. In those days (fifty years ago) one could (and I did) walk into the various buildings on campus and wander around, in and out of classrooms and labs, picking up beakers with who knows what in them, opening cupboards, and ... well, perhaps we'll leave it there.The result was that I wanted a new world around me when it was my turn to go to college and I chose Berkeley. Then, at least, Berkeley had a very much higher academic reputation, with internationally famous professors in every department; Stanford was seen as beautiful, spacious, and rather empty. With the exception of the Hoover Institution, it impressed one as a place which hardly registered outside of California.I agree that things have changed; no doubt affirmative action has had a lot to do with Berkeley's relative decline.

Two thoughts on why Berkeley doesn't get as much "respect" as Stanford, in addition to Stanford's fostering of startup culture and being private, not state:

* From Stanford it is very easy to drive to silicon valley. There are at least 3 large roads: 101, 280, and the central expressway. From much of silicon valley you can drive to Stanford for lunch (and vice versa). Of course it is also easy to drive to San Francisco.

Berkeley on the other hand, is a real chore to get to from silicon valley. From a lot of places you'll have to cross one of the usually jammed bridges.

* Stanford is a nice enough place to visit.

Driving up University Avenue to UC Berkeley can feel like driving the bad parts of the seedy strip outside a major military base. Maybe it was chic in the 60s, but now it's just gamey.

I really do hate to go off-topic, but sometimes the flesh is weak. In this case, the source of the urge is the complete disregard for Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. When every serial killer gets a Wikipedia page, Mitchell is ignored. I was even a little upset when The Derb gave it a cursory, dismissive review, especially since when reading it, I was so often reminded of We Are Doomed. Forgive me, but every once in a while I'm going to break down and drop a quote:Eugenic control over human evolution is, very simply, not in the interest of “the individual”. It is especially not in the interest of the individual at the very top, for eugenics would aim to displace those at the top from their perch. Individualism leads to huckster capitalistic philosophy of P. T. Barnum: “There’s another sucker born every minute”. Declining intelligence and declining standards of judgment might be genetically self-destructive collectively, but for “the individual” it makes great economic sense since the competition becomes easier to overcome, defeat, and exploit.

I really wish Mitch had made it to Havard or Stanford instead of being dismissed as a SUNY mediocrity. His book is an incredible amalgamation of thought. The real reason he is ignored is not because he killed himself, but because his message is that everyone has their reasons. Humans cannot bear too much objectivity. He can't be pigeonholed and so he has no advocates.

Last time there was talk of silicon alley was 1999 look how that turned out. NYC is always late to the tech party.

NYC is not even in the same league as Boston or Seattle or Austin.

There is one simple reason for this. Anyone with any brains in NYC is working in finance. Only after they fail at that do the consider other options.

A 1 billion dollar exit is a VC's dream. Many never get even a single one of these deals. By the way a billion dollar exit is only way the employees are making anything other than chump change. Compare that to even a a run of the mill hedge fund that is managing 2-3 billion and up. I don't think I have to tell you where any sensible person is going to steer their career.

Good point on Harvard's ugliness. Why? Is it Harvard's decentralization? The B-school looks OK, by itself. But the Law School is clumped together too, and it's ugly. A big part of it, perhaps, is the complete lack of appreciation of nature. Neither grass, nor trees, nor rocks are used effectively.

Regarding Heisman, I haven't been able to find any condensed version and there is not much recent discussion on the internet. Goodreads does have 13 excerpts. I read the thing by saving it in iBooks, the problem is I can't bookmark pages or highlight passages, because it's a pdf, not an ebook. So I had to be careful to keep track of page numbers, and if i recall any passages I have to mine them through the search field.

I think getting the thing converted from a PDF to a ebook would be cool. One of the readers here might have a suggestion on how to get that done.

I always heard that among the Ivies, Princeton is the best for undergrad studies. The fact that they don't have law, business, or medical schools shows where their emphasis lies. And almost all undergrad classes are taught by professors rather than TAs.

Except in some advanced hard science departments, what is taught at Yale or Harvard aint no different from what one can learn/read in any other colleges. The only crucial difference is that your peers have higher IQ.

You go to top schools not for the teachers and texts but for the students and associations.

Unless its advanced seminars for grad students, I don't see how professors make better teachers than TAs in most undergrad departments.

There are still some places, like good community college systems, where the professors are not striving near full-time for research dollars. A professor with decades experience teaching a ugrad class, who thinks of that as his profession, can be a much better teacher than a young TA. But you're right, that's not how it is in a lot of departments.

The last two comments tell me just how bad things have got, as well as just how good Berkeley was in the late '60s.My undergraduate professors, who happily and proudly taught us themselves, included tenured professors in the history, English and philosophy departments. Guest professors included the French Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson (then over 80 years of age), the English historian John Hale (later knighted), and the Augustinian scholar Peter Brown. Our introductory course in logic was taught by Alfred Tarski for heaven's sake! I remember almost no mere teaching assistants, except as precisely that, assistants. So the intellectual life at Berkeley for undergraduates was as rich and fulfilling as one wanted to make it.As for University Avenue: it was just as bad then as now. But for students it was nothing more than the corridor in and out of the place from the freeway. Student life centred around Telegraph Avenue (which IS very much worse now; last time I was there, hardly a bookshop was to be found) and, for those of us in fraternities, Piedmont.

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